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Tuesday, July 13, 2010

I want to share you some secrets I learned up until now. I am not going to tell you basic stuff like “use channels”. Also, bear with me on the graphics. I’m no designer :)

1.Blend Your ads. AdSense Color and Font size.

i.It’s tested and it works. Use the same color of your page background, for the border and the background of the ad.

ii.Use the same colors used in your page, for the AdSense ad title, text and URL link.

iii.If possible use the same font in your page, as the AdSense ads. Since the ads have variable text size and font, according to dimension and type of ad, you can never do this 100% right. But every little bit helps.

iv.Try to not separate the ad from the content (like trashing the ad in some remote corner of your website. Integrate it within the content (in, within, next to, above, below etc.).

2.Placing ads high on a page is good

Position the ads with the highest CTR, as high as possible in the page, in the source’s order (in the image below, notice that the ad appears just below the body tag). The first ads that appear in the pages (in the source’s order) get the most income per click.

3.Use images. Images and AdSense works together

Use images left or right of the ads. It makes them seen as part of the pages content, and your CTR increases. It doesn’t matter what images you use. Use any plain generic images. If you can, try to correlate those with the niche/domain of your website/blog. Be careful not to write text, point arrows or similar on the images, as that might be seen as click incentives.

4.Earnings are Variable, based on CTR

With the Smart pricing idea, your income varies a lot, according to each of your channel’s CTR rate.

Now this is very important: It’s account-wide, not channel-wide. So if you have a very good CTR (5%-50%) for one website, and you include it in the same account with a 0.04# CTR website, you will lose money.

Remove all the websites (from your account) that don’t have at least a 5% CTR (or depending on your overall CTR, remove the ones that are really lower than your average), or you’ll affect the income of all the other good converting websites.

5.Use non-standard types of Ads

We all know that web-savvy (e.g. webmasters or people that use the Internet for so many years, and know all the standards, conventions and so on) users are ad-blind.

Banners like 468×80 have been on the Internet since its creation. Even people who use the Internet vaguely or once a month, are kind of blind to these standard banners.

Instead, use vertical skyscrapers, or boxed ads. They have a much higher click rate. The AdSense team even published a list of their highest performing ad sizes:

336×280 large rectangle

300×250 inline rectangle

160×600 wide skyscraper

End note:I hope these advices help some people. If they did, drop me an e-mail and tell me about it.

I think the best keywords for adsense are keywords which are low in competition, and it is better if you have the keyword in your domain name. However, it is hard to find such keyword with good CPC. You will need to invest a lot of time for keyword research.